March 14, 2005

OFF THE MAP

Campbell Scott ("Big Night") directs this boring film adaptation of Joan Ackerman's slice-of-life play about an offbeat family of three living a fringe existence in Taos, New Mexico in the early '70s. Individual talents fail to add up. Joan Allen plays a nudist earth-mother to a precocious home-schooled daughter obsessed with snapping her inexplicably depressed father (Sam Elliot) out of his deep dark depression. You'll get more entertainment value out of staring into your refrigerator than you will watching this meandering meditation on what it means to be unclear on any concept you can dream up. Yawn.

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